Think of it as Rebooting

Every afternoon you find people reaching for coffee, sodas,
energy drinks and candy bars to fend off the mid-day slumps. What they really
need is a nap, according to new research from Matthew Walker, a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Walker
studied 39 healthy young adults who were placed into either a nap or no-nap
group, according to a reportin Live Science.

At noon, all the
participants performed a learning task intended to exercise the hippocampus, a
region of the brain
that helps store fact-based memories. Both groups performed at
comparable levels on this test.

Then at 2 p.m., the
nap group took a 90-minute siesta while the no-nap group stayed awake. Later
that day, at 6 p.m., participants performed a new round of learning exercises.
Those who remained awake throughout the day became worse at learning. In
contrast, those who napped did markedly better and actually improved in their
capacity to learn.

It seems that while you sleep, your hippocampus downloads
information into the brain’s prefrontal cortex,
which may have more storage space. That frees up the hippocampus for new
information.

Maybe your manager will understand Walker’s premise. The rub is you need to take
a pretty long nap, because the downloading process occurs during stage two non-REM
sleep – which might be hard to sell to your boss. Even if you use Walker’s e-mail analogy:

It’s as though the
e-mail inbox in your hippocampus is full and, until you sleep and clear out
those fact e-mails, you’re not going to receive any more mail. It’s just going
to bounce until you sleep and move it into another folder.